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What's Microsoft Up To?
So, today's one of those days when every bit of news is dominated by Microsoft. To spare you six different stories about the Borg, we'll assimilate them all into this one. You have seen the stupid Passport hole in an earlier story; also the iLoo, although that hasn't stopped you from submitting stories about it, oh no. New news: a report paid for by Microsoft shows that Windows is a better server than Red Hat. A class-action suit has been filed charging that MSN and Best Buy combined to scam customers. The WINHEC conference is ongoing - Steve Ballmer says DRM is an opportunity, not a prison, the Xbox is going to be your home communications center, Wired talks about how hardware will be changed to imprison users, and once you're locked in to Microsoft you get to pay more each year. An article describes why user desktops are locked down. Oh, and here's another on DRM, just because.
Anyone see this new Microsoft robot crawling their websites? It's apparently legitimate, or at least acknowledged by Microsoft. Competition for Google?
Google doesn't index user sigs, so stop trying to "Google Bomb" with them.
From another CNN article released yesterday, Gates says this of DRM:
"Consumers shouldn't be worried that Microsoft Corp.'s new security technology will wrest control of their PCs and give it to media companies, Bill Gates said this week. They can always choose not to use it, he said."
Holy poopy-poop, that's misleading. People are going to read this and think "they" means "them." As in "the consumer can always choose not to use it." It, of course, doesn't. It means the creators of the content. And there goes fair use. And while I'm on it, can someone who is a lawyer tell me if we have a right to fair use or is it merely a thing that we've enjoyed because copyright holders couldn't ever get such a firm grip on it enough to effectively control it?
But anyway, back to the issue. In the same article further down, we see:
"Gates said the format of digital content is up to their creators, and Microsoft is only providing a platform on which record labels and movie studios -- as well as others -- can build."
This is a fairly reasonable argument, not so different from the people who run Kazaa saying "hey, we're just an indexer, blame the end-user." Perhaps Microsoft isn't culpable here, either. What they're creating here is a valid tool, one that can allow people a strong form of encryption. The blame for the abuse of that tool, I think, does not rightfull belong in Microsoft's lap.
You might correctly argue that MS is doing this knowing full well that abuse is going to occur and stands to profit from it. Again, Napster et al. We cannot play both sides of the fence here.
My
Limekiller
Now I'll be the first to note that the man should have paid closer attention to his receipt, but this is definitely not uncommon at many Best Buys.
The Best Buy corporation likes to make a marketting bullet point about how their salespeople are not paid commissions and therefore aren't going to pressure you into sales you don't need. However, they conveniently forget to mention that the sales records of these employees are carefully tracked and while they don't get the positive re-enforcement of a commission income, they get plenty of negative re-enforcement for failing to push MSN, Netflix, service plans or anything else the corporate HQ wants customers to buy into.
Besides seeing such happen as a customer, I worked myself at a Best Buy for an entire eight hours in their computer department a year back and watched one the saleskids first try to push the MSN subscription on a customer who refused it the eight times it was asked, and then had it put on his credit card by the worker anyways.
When I asked the sales manager about the legality of this he merely muttered something about it being the customer's responsibility to keep track of their receipt and that he rewarded such agressive tactics.
I quit that job right then and there.
More horror stories for those look for an entertaining, though depressing read.
Okay, so it is rather redundant to say, but any benchmarking / testing paid for by a party is pretty much guaranteed to be biased in favor of that party.
Anyway, what is up with all the (ONLY 3?) testing systems being PIII Xeons? Where are the AMD chips for comparison? Sounds like Microsoft made sure the systems and benchmarks were very thoroughly optimized in their favor.
I was taking one day at a time, but then several days got together and ambushed me. (from a Rhymes with Orange comic)
Yes, we all know that it's true.
And they're certain to want to rope off pieces of pie for themselves.
Despite all this, though, I think the general idea of a PC with the functionality of "Athena" is a good idea. If MS uses it's big cudgel to bring down the PC decibel level (you can hear `em whining already - "but we gotta cool our 4 GHz chips!"), increase the reliability (go ahead and use cheap capacitors - we won't let you put a quad-color sticker on the outside), and standardize hardware interfaces for telephony, then that would be a largely positive move.
Of course, as Linux user, I'd like to see all these new standards published openly and available for free to anyone who thinks they could implement them.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
You left out this interview with Steve Ballmer. I demand satisfaction!
OLPC Australia
NOt at there current cost, but there is a lot of places they would be used.
Replace charts in hospitals, the ability to pull up 3d image of an architect design while walking around a site, warehouse so you can compare inventory lists to actual product, at home so you could carry into the kitchen for recipes, stream some music to it, lok up something about your favorite tv show. I can see many ses for them, but the cost is just too high. If the could gut the cost to less then 400 bucks with color and a decent spec, they wuld start appearing everywhere.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
They disabled last access time updating under windows. They didn't under Linux. This is enough to account for these differences, I suspect.
I must say, it was pretty hot. I took it into class, I loaded up the journal program and took notes with it, I had the day's reading (which had been distributed via electronic reserve) loaded into acrobat reader, and it worked well. The best was, of course, the wireless internet, and as we were discussing the latest nigerian elections I was able to pull up nyt.com and report on the latest news from the region.
On the other hand, I found the handwriting recognition horrible (it's supposed to learn your handwriting as you use it, which is why it always works so well for the demo people). The process of converting my three pages of notes from the journal program to ascii text took about a half hour - it would have been faster to retype them. Battery was almost dead after a 2 hour class, and I couldn't have used it in more than one class. Taking notes is fine, cause you can clean it up later, but basic input is very difficult (entering nyt.com via handwriting took about 60 seconds, and then I had to enter my username and password - and since the password was **** starred out, I didn't really know whether it had correctly interpereted my handwriting until I got the big error screen from the times.
My conclusion: TabletPCs are the future for academic environments, but not for three or four generations of the products, and not until apple makes one :-p.
I like
- posting
- reading articles
- reading posts
- thinking about posts
But there is too much here in this article that covers a lot of different ground. I think I'll give this topic a break and read a book today during my break.(It's like last couple of
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
"First things first -- but not necessarily in that order"
-- The Doctor, "Doctor
That's so... 1996. This is one of the tactics Novell tried to use to keep corporations from replacing NetWare with NT. What Novell found out is that no one cared about file server performance. As long as the performance was "good enough" and Windows had more gizmos, they were screwed.
Of course, this is just one part of Microsoft's strategy against Linux and OSS. But I'm pretty sure that this salvo will fall on deaf ears.
the no
I saw this comment on LWN yesterday, pointing out that they were comparing the PEAK throughput. Windows 2003 may have a higher number for this, but it's the overall throughput that really matters.
Now having said all this, I'm not surprised, I've been reading performance comparisons for 25 years and strangely enough, the sponsoring company's hardware/software/operating systems always seem to come out on top. This started with comparing the 8086 to the 68000 and has continued on to the present day.
The important/best thing about the review is that it states very clearly at the top that the test was sponsored by Microsoft.
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
They also set up the servers with one NIC for each CPU. The uniprocessor box had one ethernet card, while the 8-way box had eight ethernet cards. If I remember, this is similar to the Mindcraft tests, where they tested file and web serving performance on systems having four ethernet adapters. I wouldn't call this a normal real-world configuration.
Maybe there are some cases where a fileserver is connected to several separate ethernet networks, but in my mind, that's an unusual configuration. I wonder if it's a contrived test, designed to exploit a difference between the Linux and Windows kernel, especially in handling multi-cpu / multi-NIC machines.
Perhaps Windows gets a larger boost than Linux from CPU affinity, especially on the chosen hardware (e.g. the IRQs from each ethernet card are dedicated to a specific CPU). There may be some room for improvement. It might even be that Linux doesn't fully support the chipset or APIC on that particular server, and therefore can't make the same optimization.
The nurses will lose the damn pens, and I'm not sure but I don't think that replacing them will be on the scale of replacing a bic, the pen on a Compaq tablet has a battery.
The nurses will lose, drop, or spill something over the devices. When we first rolled out pagers to nurses many came back broken and still do, a fairly large number ended up in toilets (poorly designed clips were the problem there). The point is that most health care workers have physically demanding, mobile jobs.
Most importantly the battery life of this generation of tablets is nowhere near the length neccessary. Most of our nurses work 12 hour shifts, they are not going to want to have to charge or swap batteries every day.
If anyone out there works in a hospital and have tested or rolled out these devices I would love to hear about your experiences.
This same thing happened to me when I bought my mother a desktop and myself a laptop April 2002. They charged a penny to my best buy bill, too, for a 6-month trial experience - which as far as I remember, I did not give/sign for anything saying I'll pay for MSN after the time (6 months is over). When I asked why they said, "Inventory Tracking purposes." Just like the plantiff in the original story.
I, absentmindedly, said, "Oh. OK." and shrug it off. A month later, I say, "Hey what's this MSN experience like and throw in the disk." Know that I already had cable interent via COX.
Not being able to connect to MSN through cable, I called their customer support hot-line and spoke to a rep who informed me that MSN is not available through cable internet. Then, she suggests that I purchase a DSL line through MSN.
A) I haven't used a land line since Y2K.
B) Why would I want to have two sources of internet hooked up in my place? I wouldn't.
C) Too costly!
Land Line ($45/month)
Cable Internet ($39.99/month)
DSL Subsciber ($39.99/month)
MSN Account ($22.95/month)
OUCH!
So I tell her no thanks and hang up, feeling rather refreshed for having gotten off the phone with MSN - butterfly or no.
Well, five months later I get a charge on my charge card for MSN Service. WTF!?
I called and called and called. It took almost two weeks to get in contact with the correct person to remove the charges. When they did remove the charges, it took them two months to do so!
Math Class!
Let's see:
My bill
22.95 @ 12 %interest = x
Microsoft's bill (Hrm)
22.95 times (like) 8000 customers who don't know their being billed ($22.95) + the interest earned on those 8K peeps + MSNs delay time of two months = one helluva chunk of ka-ching via interest alone EVEN IF THOSE SAME PEEPS WERE SEEKING TO STOP MSNs "service."
To make matters worse, they did the same to my mother. If I hadn't mentioned it to her, she might still be paying that bill.
Curse Microsoft!
After a quick read of the study, I have the following question(s):
Isn't this more of a test of Samba on RedHat, than RedHat itself? When you talk filesharing on a Windows network, that's pretty much what you're limited to, isn't it?
I mean, if you want a good comparison test, why don't you see how Windows Server 2003 does as an NFS file server? (I know, NFS isn't the best, but I think you get my drift).
Never mind the fact that Microsoft doesn't exactly share their network file sharing protocol with the Samba guys who, if I recall correctly, have mostly reverse engineered things. What's to stop Microsoft from tweaking the protocol to their advantage in a new release, then quickly testing it against a version of Samba uses an older non-optimal protocol?
/. readers are smart enough to figure out that MS is trying to do is to make computers inobtrusive and pervasive within the home and office.
MS should be thanked for pushing the usability envelope as far as it has since most competetors (including open source) are striving for a MS like interface/functionality in their software packages.
1. The CPU/Motherboard/video/network should be in a non-upgradable box.
2. The OS/application programs should be on a CD-R or download on demand Java applets. This includes a build manager which lets you add/remove packages to the base installation, burn it on CD-R, and then boot up with that OS on a user machine.
3. Data storage should be on an external USB enclosure type hard disk or flash card
This greatly lowers the total IT cost by:
1. Swap out a CPU unit to upgrade a machine/fix a broken one without having to recreate the data
2. OS upgrades are easy as booting off a new CD-R
3. The total cost of such a box would be very low
4. The IT orginization could include any extra software packages required on the CD-R or on the network drive
5. The cost of software would be much lower than a MS OS and MS Office license
Knoppix and a CD-ROM bootable Linux from Scratch will be the ancestors of this.